June 30th, 2010

Russian

As a review (and for something to do while doing less interesting things, like dishes and laundry), I listened to lessons 8-28 of Russisch ohne Mühe. After listening to it, I’m reminded again of the fact that while I progress more slowly due to the base language being German, I still prefer Russisch ohne Mühe (1971) over Russian without Toil (1951). It seems tighter, and just generally to be of better quality. I suppose that’s logical enough, what with it being the second “try” at a Russian course for Assimil.

Dutch

While I didn’t do a whole lot of it, I finally got around to copying out some Dutch by hand for some much needed spelling practice. I copied lessons one and two of Dutch with Ease. I’ve already noted a few things I had not noticed previously, despite reading the lessons repeatedly. For example, it’s maakt, not makt (makes, does), and zes, not ses (six). I also listened to around 15 minutes of Dutch radio online, but didn’t really understand a great deal of it. I know that at one point they were talking about Michael Jackson, however…

German

I added around 40 cards to Anki, mostly from Langenscheidt’s Basic German Vocabulary text. Still plugging vocabulary holes, it seems. A few of them were from a paragraph from the Wikipedia article Chinesisch-Schwedische Expedition; I’m not quite sure what in this article caught my eye, but I found the paragraph stuffed in a Google Documents file with a number of translations already added in at the bottom. The one that I found most interesting was the phrase “vor Ort,” which means “on site, in the field.”

I also listened to an episode of ZeitZeichen. It was about the death of the Aztec leader Moctezuma II (later to be called Montezuma by the Spaniards).

Danish

Did I say Danish? Um, yes, yes I did. 😯 You see, I was looking on Abebooks for one thing, and I came across another thing, that thing being an old copy of Teach Yourself Danish. And it was only a dollar! So of course, I had to buy it, just in case. But the book arrived today, and I couldn’t help myself, and so I read the preface and general introduction. Having done nothing more, my only comment is that the book reports that the language shares a huge number of loan words from German, as well as a large number of words sharing the same root as similar English words. Thus, anyone with a knowledge of English and German already has a leg up in learning Danish. Well, isn’t that convenient. 😳